Point Clouds
A lidar scanner sends out laser pulses and times their echoes, so each echo becomes a point with its place, how strongly it reflected (intensity) and often a class (ground, vegetation, building, water).
This picture is a cloud of paint. You can , , , , , , and .
Paint with your finger. It stays on these splats, wherever they go next.
Your paint is on this cloud. to see the sharp picture.
- Shelf
- Studio
- Kind
- Built from a recipe
- Your own
- Your own point cloud
- Sound
- Yes
- Licenses
- Public domain, MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD
How to play
Tap to sweep a lidar scan line across it. Turn on Measure in the Splash tab, then tap two points.
Its controls
| Control | Kind | Range | Start |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sweep a lidar scan line over it | Tap | ||
| Scan | Button | ||
| Pin (Measure on: tap the points) | Button | ||
| Point cloud | List | 4 choices | Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco (LAZ) |
| Color by | List | 4 choices | Height |
| Shaded relief (light from the northwest) | Setting | ||
| Point size | Setting | ||
| Measure: tap two points | Setting | ||
| Thin | List | 5 choices | Keep every point |
| Crop with a box | Setting | ||
| Box: west side | Setting | ||
| Box: east side | Setting | ||
| Box: bottom | Setting | ||
| Box: top | Setting | ||
| Box: north side | Setting | ||
| Box: south side | Setting | ||
| Box: keep what is outside it | Setting | ||
| Up is | List | 3 choices | Automatic (Z, or Y for PLY) |
About it
A lidar scanner sends out laser pulses and times their echoes, so each echo becomes a point with its place, how strongly it reflected (intensity) and often a class (ground, vegetation, building, water). Millions of points make a point cloud. This splash opens LAS, LAZ (compressed LAS), PLY, XYZ and PTS files and draws its points as small splats (as many as this device can show, all of them on most computers), colored by height, intensity, classification or the file's own colors. Water barely reflects the laser, so lakes and the sea show as holes.
The samples are real airborne lidar from the U.S. Geological Survey's 3D Elevation Program: San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts, the Golden Gate Bridge's south end with Fort Point, and Meteor Crater in Arizona, a hole 1.2 kilometers wide blasted by an iron meteorite about 50,000 years ago. Measure gives the straight distance between two points, the distance along the ground and the rise. Crop and Thin work on every point, and Save writes PLY, LAS or XYZ. Your files stay on your device.
Details
- Splats
- Opens at 200,000 at Mid Detail, 113,204 at Low, and up to 377,348 at Max
- Your own files
- .las, .laz, .ply, .xyz, .pts, .txt, .csv
Sources and credits
| Work | By | License |
|---|---|---|
| USGS 3DEP lidar, CA_SanFrancisco_1_B23 (300 m around the Palace of Fine Arts, 450,000 of its 8 million points) | U.S. Geological Survey, 3D Elevation Program | Public domain (U.S. Government work) |
| USGS 3DEP lidar, CA_SanFrancisco_1_B23 (340 m around Fort Point, 450,000 of its points) | U.S. Geological Survey, 3D Elevation Program | Public domain (U.S. Government work) |
| USGS 3DEP lidar, AZ_NorthEast_3_D23 (1.6 km around Barringer meteorite crater, 450,000 of its 8.5 million points) | U.S. Geological Survey, 3D Elevation Program | Public domain (U.S. Government work) |
Libraries
- MIT
- gifenc 1.0.3
- Apache-2.0
- laz-perf 0.0.7 (lane LSTUDIO, copied from Splashery)
- MIT, BSD
- WebP codec (splat-transform, with libwebp)
In The Splash Manual
Share it
This link opens it in the Playground. To put it on your own page, add the element and one script tag. Every option.
https://splashery.app/play/?toy=point-clouds
<script type="module" src="https://splashery.app/play/src/element.js"></script> <splashery-toy toy="point-clouds"></splashery-toy>
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